Although minimalism was born in the 1960s, it was only in the 1970s that it began to exert an influence over composers in all parts of the world. As radical, in its way, as the total serialism of the 1950s, and just as disciplined, minimal music reinstated tonal relationships and made a virtue out of repetition, repetition, repetition. Few were unaffected by it: even Stockhausen and Boulez produced works of comparative simplicity and dramatic directness.